She's going down!!

Well, I think that the bell is about to toll for old hill-dawg. Personally, I think she's no better than Barack... or McCain for that matter. I just like this picture.



I actually like it better this way.




Anyway, I don't vote so who cares what I think. Personally I think voting in local elections is far more important than the presidential election.

In other news a preschool teacher was caught calling a bunch of 4 and 5 year olds stupid.

Watch the video here

This happened in Houston, about 2 hours away from us. Now as a resident of Texas I must say... there are a lot of stupid 5 yr olds around here. Regardless, this is one of the reasons Hayden is going to private school. If anybody is going to call him stupid it'll be his father... or standardized testing.

97th percentile!

Seri just had her 1 year and is in the 97th percentile for size... and 75th for weight. So she's big. She had to get 5 shots!! I had to be the one to hold her so I wasn't her favorite guy for a while. The doctors also found a slight heart murmur so we get to a specialist in a few days. I have a murmur as well and mine isn't very serious so I'm hoping that hers isn't a big deal. The doctor said that if it was serious she wouldn't be so big and healthy so I'm not going to let my self worry yet. She spent the day as one sick puppy though.



Hayden got a cool treat. Uncle cousin John came back from Germany with Kinder eggs. They're chocolate eggs with toys inside. Hayden got a cool measuring tape that snaps back in when pulled out. So it became a ninja grappling hook for power rangers... and then a tow rope for his hot wheels... and then something else when he was playing on the stairs. It's hard to keep up with his imagination!

Well, got to shove off to work. Have a great Friday!!

How can you possibly take this seriously?

Hillary Clinton gets flowers from a Mexican boy in a sombrero after firing her Latino campaign manager.



I can honestly say, I did not think that there was enough pot in the US to make anyone think that this was a good idea. Lets take a walk down stupid lane for a minute.

Hillary fires her campaign manager. This is probably a good idea after she got the great advice to whip up some tears on camera, which worked the first time but screwed her the second time. Did she cry just to manipulate voters. You bet your sweet freedom she did.

Her campaign manager happens to be Latino. In my 30 years I have come to find that everyone is of a race. There is not a person on this planet that is not of some sort of ethnicity. That being said it is a fair bet that her campaign manager would be of a certain race. Low and behold she's Latino. She was obviously sucking at her job so she got fired. I seriously doubt that Hillary said "OMG, a Latino on my staff... get rid of her!!" So her ethnicity probably didn't have anything to do with anything.

(Here's where it gets funny) Hillary worries about the Latino vote and decides to have a young Mexican boy in full mariachi garb give her flowers.

How did that conversation go?

H-dog "Hey I'm going to Texas and I just fired my campaign manager?"
Idiot staffer "So what?"
H-dog "She was Latino."
Idiot staffer "Oh sweet baby Jesus NO!!! Damage control! Damage Control!"
H-dog "Wait I got it. I'll get some Mexican kid to give me flowers, that way the Latino population will know what's up."
Idiot staffer "They'll know that you like flowers?"
H-dog "Whatever, lets roll!"
Bill "Can we stop by Taco Cabana?"

Blue Harvest

Here's a quick synopsis of the 4th Star Wars movie... or the first of the good ones, (depending on how you count them) from a 3 yr olds perspective.

BTW Hayden LOVES Star Wars, because I tell him he has to.

The Oscars... who cares

As a public service I would like to extend these words of wisdom to anyone who watched the Oscars.

"If you won an award at your job, none of these actors or actresses would care. So why do you care if they are good at their jobs? GO OUTSIDE!"

Don't mess with the classics

We have decided that Neapolitan ice cream is the family favorite. You got all the good stuff in there. You got the strawberry, the chocolate and the vanilla to smooth it all together. What's better then an ice cream treat when it's 80 degrees outside. (luckily dad remembered the chocolate syrup!)

Of course, Seri had to get some too. She likes to cry if I don't get the spoon to her fast enough. Is there any doubt that she's an Arnold?


In other news a Norwegian doctor believes that by changing the diet of your ADHD child you can actually "cure" them of their disorder. (news article) The believe is that children suffering from ADHD have problems digesting certain proteins and by eliminating them from the child's diet will reverse the affects ADHD.

I think I'll stick to my parents tried and true method. A whack to the back of the head.

She's mobile now...

The good thing about having a son first is that your daughter can get his old t-shirt and it doesn't look too out of place. If it were the other way around we might have a small problem. Wait a minute... I was born after Kelly. That explains my Care Bear lunch box!!


Oh and Seri is now mobile. So we can add walking to her list of skills.

Click here to download the video, the original is a little brighter.

How to watch your 1 year old daughter

Do you have a hyperactive one year old? You need 3 minutes of silence? Just give her a cookie!


I'm a parenting mastermind... I should write a book or something!

(cookies sold separately!)

Spagetti Bowls

I'm the default cook in our house. I think I got this title because of Joy always working weird hours... and alot of them at that. I'll be the first to admit that I pretty much suck in the kitchen. I can do all the guy stuff. I can grill all my favorites and I can even pull off a decent brisket. But, in the kitchen I'm lost. One thing I can make is spaghetti... because it's easy. The best thing about spaghetti is the left overs. Spaghetti is always best 2 or 3 days later. Here's my world famous recipe for Ben's Spaghetti Bowl.



1. Get yesterdays spaghetti and put some in a bowl
2. Put cheese on it
3. Put hot sauce on it
4. Microwave it
5. Prepare for glory

Windows Media Player 11

Even though I make my bread and butter off of Bill Gates I have to admit that I am pretty leery of any number of Microsoft product. Being that as it may I gave over my music collection to Media Player 11. It has the ability (after a bunch of finagling) to reorganize all of your music by artist, album and song order. All you have to do is go to the Rip menu and select More Options. From there you set your "rip music destination" to wherever your music is. Then go to the More Options under the Library tab and give Media Player the "rights" to reorganize your music. You should select all the tabs under Automatic Media Information Updates. On a side note make sure that all your meta data is correct on your MP3's... but Media Player 11 is pretty good at that too. Basically, if you have all your album art you are good to go.

With all my music synced up the way I want it I can finaly teach Hayden the finer points of rocking out.

Avatar and the ceiling fans

Big day today. I want to get in at least one ceiling fan, get all the laundry done and get in some quality screw around time as well... which brings me to my latest gripe. I miss the Avatar. For those of you who don't know it is a cartoon on Nick. I don't know if it was the writers strike or what but they haven't been churning out any new ones in a while. Hayden, Joy and I started watching this from the get go and we're all really hooked. In fact it's pretty much the only show Joy and I actually try to watch every episode of. Anyway, I've gone as far as pirating the last two just to see them.

Speaking of TV, I'm kind of getting sick of it. In our house it's on Noggin pretty much all day. Noggin is a great pre-school only station. It's all educational stuff and it's pretty much all Hayden watches. Other then that I'll maybe watch Discovery but that's it. So why are we paying for all these other channels? It's all crap most of the time. I'm thinking I should cut back the cable channels a little and maybe they can upgrade my internet speed without increasing the bill. More speed means more shooting other people!!

I think that the less TV you watch directly affects how happy you are. I never want to be one of those "TV is always on" families. We had some friends that would do that. No matter what was going on that thing was on... and it was loud. God, that drove me nuts. Try to spend a day at your house with it off. Don't cheat and have plans, just keep it off on a stay at home day. It's really relaxing... once you get over the withdrawals!

Sprucing up the Homestead

We decided to finally start buying stuff for the house... as in decorating and whatnot. It's not that we didn't want to in the past it's just that we're finally getting to the point that there aren't any more pressing things. Well, there are some more pressing things but they're not as fun and we have caller ID so screw you bill collectors!!!

We just got a new fan for Hayden's room and are going to try and get a light fixture a pay check till we get all the old ones out of the house. The new fan is pretty nice. The one I really want to get rid of is this thing.
It's really ugly and perfect for hitting your head on! I really like our house and I'm excited to turn it into what we want. It's really the first place I've been happy to come home from work to in a long while!

Oh and as an added bonus here's Hayden giving someone the business.

Dogwood is up

Well, the new PC is finally stable and I got dogwood back up. I don't know if anyone was waiting on it but it sure helps me at work. I kind of use it as my storage area for everything I need to access at work since it's an easy way to get past the firewalls. The fun part is that I made my own little graphic for it. Instead of "borrowing" something from deviant art I found this program called Apophysis which randomly generates a bunch of wacky 3dish are which I can then photoshop into something cool.

I started with this picture


and ended up with this.




I like it alot and it is actually 100% mine (give or take). Anyway it's a fun program to work with, but it doesn't replace actual 3d drawing skill... which I promise to teach myself as soon as I get a chance!

Stupid video card!!!

I bought a 8800 GT from EVGA for my PC downstairs. It's not the best out there but it should do fine. My problem with it is heat. The card runs in the 50s at idle and in the low 70s when stressed. It has some sort of thing where the default drivers won't run the fan properly. A popular fix for this is to run riva tuner to control fan speed but I think that the software is pretty crappy. I've set GPU fan to run manually at 60% and it seems ok. I get in the upper 40s at idle and in the 60s when stressed which I guess is fine. The weird thing is in CoD 4 i get some lag. It seems to be server lag based on the lagometer but I still don't like it.

The big problem is me I guess. I really rocked at CoD 2 but I don't have the time to get good at CoD 4 so I pretty much suck. Oh well at least I have a good streak. 25 in a row... not too shabby!!

What went wrong at comunity college?

Heather and Jake... well I guess just Heather took Sydney to a "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus" show. Now I don't know who Mo Williams is and Hayden is more into things that shoot other things more than mass-tranist fowl but my question is... what went wrong with these two?

When did they hit that bump in the road where they couldn't sell any more plasma and had to don the foam pigeon costume? Now I love my kids... and I'd do anything for them, but there isn't enough tea in China to make me dress up like an idiot for a bunch of 4 year olds. Oh well, Syd looks happy and that's good enough for me.

Meanwhile, back in SA, Hayden and I ran into the H. E. Buddy. He's the local supermarket store mascot. I guess he's suppose to be a sack of crap or something.

Anyway, our converations went like this

Me: "Hayden, you see that sack of crap over there?"
Hayden: "Yeah"
Me: "You wanna shake his hand?"
Hayden: "Nope"
Me: "You wanna kick him and then run?"
Hayden: "Sure!"